“Can You Read This to Me?” He Asked the Woman the Town Called Simple—And She Read It All

Chapter 24

It came on a Saturday, with the post rider.

June brought it in, holding it the way she had held the county’s letter, but differently — she had seen the writing on the front, and she knew enough about the ways of the household to carry it carefully. It was a small envelope, in a hand that Ada would have known blind: the careful letterforms, the precise slant, the shaping of the letters as if each one were a door being shut so it could be opened again.

Ada took it into her room and read it in the lamplight, alone, in the particular silence of a woman reading the handwriting of a woman who had taught her to shape letters in the dust of a county home on the other side of the mountains.

There were three sentences. Sister Honora had always written letters the way she said amen — short, and final, and complete.

Ada: of all the endings I hoped for from that book, I never once hoped for one this complete. The little one is found, the book is home, the tower is still going up. I am an old woman with four years of teaching left in me, and I tell you plainly: you were the best reader I ever raised, and now I understand why. You were always reading toward something.

She read it three times. Then she sat with it in her hands for a long time in the lamplight, with the wind coming down off the ridge and the house holding its dark around her the way houses do when they are used to being held in it, and she was not crying — she had learned the economy of that long ago — but something in her had been waiting for this letter without knowing it, the way a fence waits for its light.

That night she showed it to Silas at the table, and then she took the Bible down from the shelf and opened it, and she laid out the letters — three papers now, in a row on the table: her own letter, folded on the post office steps, still sealed, never opened; Sister Honora’s old county letter, fifteen years old, that had lived in the Bible through all of it; and this new one, small and warm, come the other way down the road.

Silas read the old letter slowly. He read the new one twice. He held each one the way a man holds a small and finished thing — carefully, so as not to crease what was already exact.

“She says you read to the little ones,” he said.

“I did,” Ada said.

“You still do.”

They sat a moment in the quiet, the four papers on the table between them like a small history of the road — the sealed letter of a woman nobody would hire; the reference she never once used; the county’s honest notation; and the reply to a story’s ending, come home.

“You’d best keep them together,” Silas said. “Letters that carried you.”

Ada picked them up, the four of them, and laid them back in the Bible, in order, and shut it, and put it on the shelf where it had stood through everything — and the house completed something that night, the way a house completes a turn it has been making for a year, and slipped the latch of the day, and rested.

Outside, the snow came down, quiet and steady, covering everything over — the mill, the fence, the turned ground, the whole shape of the county — making the world new — and inside, in the warm, the jar stood on the table, the book stood on its shelf, and the family slept, and the house did not wait for anyone.

Not anymore.